A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

Perhaps unwittingly, the Chinese government has been assisted in its effort to shut the project down by a spectrum of organizations skeptical of markets, including CAFOD, Christian Aid, Oxfam, or Save the Children. Most recently, Christina Chang, a lead economic analyst at CAFOD appears to react to our article on FP’s Democracy Lab:

By lamenting the “uniquely democratic” debate around Doing Business, its self-appointed supporters are doing it a disservice. An independent review and a public debate are exactly what is needed.

That is not exactly a charitable way of identifying our position. We say explicitly that the project can be improved and are perfectly willing to entertain some of the specific suggestions Ms. Chang makes in her article, including the idea that the costs of corruption to businesses should be explicitly captured by the project, that the measure of access to credit could be improved, and that infrastructure-related constraints to doing business (such as access to electricity) could improve the project’s accuracy.

What bothers us, however, is that the critics of the project are also trying to undermine the key elements of the survey – namely the measures of taxation and labor market regulation. A large body of evidence shows that corporate taxation and labor market regulation have real costs to businesses – a fact Ms. Chang downplays by saying that these do not come up frequently in enterprise surveys in the developing world. While surveys may serve as a useful complement to the analysis of objective data on institutions, it is not sensible to use them as a basis for discarding specific elements of the Doing Business report – especially if independent evidence indicates that these elements matter.

Also, the goal of measuring taxation and labor market regulation as a cost to business has little to do with advancing an agenda of radical tax cuts or deregulation - although we would argue that such agenda would yield significant welfare gains in many countries around the world - instead, it has to do with an understanding of the relevant policy trade-offs.

The most serious flaw of Ms. Chang’s article lies in a confusion between the problems afflicting crony capitalism in the West and the development of private markets in emerging economies around the world:

The 2008 financial crisis highlighted long-standing reasons why the world needs to take a fresh look at how it does business. Unemployment has reached painful levels in many countries around the world. Multinational corporations use offshore jurisdictions to avoid billions in tax. Rampant inequality has become a hot-button issue.

For all these reasons, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is right to conclude that the bank’s flagship Doing Business report needs a fresh look.

Let’s ignore the claim that inequality is on the rise, which is not true globally, and focus on the fact that Ms. Chang argued that the economic problems of the developed West somehow justify rethinking a project that has mostly informed policymaking in low- and mid-income countries. That would make sense if the policy recommendations that can be supported by the Doing Business project were also connected with the factors that have been driving economic problems of the West, such as unemployment, or the financial crisis of 2008. Yet Ms. Chang offers us no evidence for such claim.